... Pandora and Canada is? We used to get Pandora here in the socialist republic of Canuckistan. However, that stopped some time ago (2 years?). Which sucked massively, since (at the time), the service was incredibly awesome.
I wish we could get it back, but I don't even know why it left to begin with...
I like achievements that reward for completing aspects of the game that would stand on their own. Such as defeating boss X, clearing instance Y or achieving Z kills in a deathmatch.
However, I intensely dislike achievements which are the extra content - such as exploration, collection and some hard-modes.
The overwhelming majority of the WoW achievements are, in my opinion, achievements done wrong. The ones that reward your average raider or pvper for accomplishing the goals that they were shooting for before the achievement system even came out, are my idea of achievements done right.
Your current soldiers are solid. Your previous soldiers were solid. This isn't a pissing contest, but when it comes to having historically solid troops I think we, at least, have earned the right to reflect on the sacrifices of our respective troops on different days *. Yours on your day, and mine on my day. Which is to say, we know it's memorial day. Your soldiers are and have been heroes, but keep your holiday to yourselves. Just as the rest of us keep ours to ourselves.
* - it's worth noting (though I can't find the citation) that the method by which the cdns held kapyong against the 3-5:1 odds was by calling down artillery on their own position
It Makes sense, there just defending their spices!
So Barking is just Alien language, they're communicating their plans for world Domination with each other!
FTFA: Amazingly, right now Chihuahuas are still considered C. lupus familiaris, a subspecies of wolf. And calling a Chihuahua a wolf is like calling someone at the Discovery Institute a scientist.
Dogs aren't even a separate species from wolves. Further subdividing them is just silly.
Yup, completely silly. When I think of a yappy little chihuahua, I think "Osht son, that wolf wants to eet meh!! RUNS!!!!!1111eleven" and definitely don't think about how much I'd like to kick the yappy fucking football >.<"
That was sarcasm btw; just throwing that out there in case someone misses it.
Well you have to grow the crops to create the biomass, no? That requires things like herbicides (potentially not required if the weeds are just as useful as the crop) and pesticides. It also requires harvesting in some fashion. All that is currently accomplished (except on not-so-useful small scales) via tractors. Tractors use gasoline or diesel. Currently (citation likely needed, but I can't remember where I read it) biofuels are being slammed because of the fact that it takes more fuel to grow and process the biomass than is actually recovered from the biomass as biofuel to begin with.
I would put forth that the absolute dollar cost is not really the issue, it's the ratio of energy in vs. energy out that is.
Of course, that's also ignoring the amount of arable land required to grow that biomass - use too much land and suddenly the cost of crops that could otherwise be grown there increases.
There's a good part of me that agrees wholeheartedly with what you just wrote. There's another part that finds the idea of gassing my kid mildly horrific. I think I'd still side with you on this one though. If you can trick your kid into becoming mildly sedated, so that they don't freak right the hell out as soon as they hear the high-pitched whine of a dentist's pneumatic tool, then it's probably worth considering.... as long as it doesn't knock them completely unconscious.
But that nagging feeling of it being wrong likely wouldn't go away. =S
The kid died from respiratory obstruction due to a malformed lower jaw and pneumonia. The article you're linking to mentions that the NO2 did aggravate those factors, but it was hardly the cause. Also, the article is from 1926 and the death occurred in 1923... pneumonia was the 2nd leading cause of death in 1923 as well.
While those statements of yours seem logically constructed at face value. It should be noted that CO2 isn't considered life-enhancing. That's like saying that logging companies should have never started replanting programs b/c cutting down trees is life-enhancing. Sure, cutting down trees is life-enhancing, but replanting programs make sure there's no shortage of supply. Your argument is akin to saying "cars are life-enhancing, so I should be able to drive mine through crowds at high speed."; The premise has absolutely nothing to do with the conclusion, other than the fact that they both involve cars.
So to with your argument, your premise and conclusion have no relation, unless your sole objection to "going green" is that decreasing CO2 emissions may affect your quality of life by lowering availability of creature comforts or significantly raising costs on them.
I share that concern. However, building/refitting skyscrapers to use solar panels, heat pumps, and self-contained greenhouses to deal with most of their heat/electricity generation and deal with most of their waste production would serve to enhance life: less pollution and less strain on the power grid (ie. less brownouts/rolling blackouts during heat-waves for places like california).
Given the cost of gas, if I could present you with two vehicles to choose from. The vehicles are identical in every way, except that one costs $1000 more, but gets twice the gas mileage. Which would you choose? $1000 more on a vehicle, over 5 years would cost an extra $16 a month on your car payments. But would cut your gas spending in half. Would that extra cash be life-enhancing? I pay $150-200 a month in gas, so it'd be pretty damned life-enhancing for me.
Basically, when people hear "this move will cause costs to go up. This is a trillion dollar program" it sounds like something we should immediately be against. But there are tangible benefits to many green technologies. In the case of hybrid vehicles, those costs are outweighed by the benefits. How many other changes would follow similar trends?
I challenge you to name a set of "natural laws" or really any aspect of current scientific research or long established dogma that isn't just a model at heart.
I'll grant you that it may not be fine-grained enough to allow for testable predictions within natural cycles, but it does show that there's a correlation between CO2 and temperature. Whether that means that CO2 changes cause temperature changes, or that temperature changes cause CO2 changes, or that some other process causes them isn't really all that relevant. The model is sufficiently robust as to state, quite clearly, that increasing CO2 emissions is potentially a bad idea, and that reducing them is potentially a good idea.
The question isn't "is the model fine grained enough that we can make large predictions based on it?".
The questions are "what are the risks associated with the possible courses of action/inaction provided it's right/wrong?
It's a factor in a risk assessment, plain and simple. Not to mention the fact that there are likely hundreds of thousands of business opportunities involved in becoming more green. It's all a matter of how it's done.
Disclaimer - I'm a meat-eating, V6-driving, ex-military hunter who is completely addicted to technology. ie. A far cry from a tree-hugger. That being said, if you can present me with green alternatives to the energy-hungry devices I RELY on, that aren't 150% the cost of the non-green versions, I will happily take them.
The field of AI is not comprised of a majority of researchers frantically trying to build an expert system that can pass a Turing Test. Visual data is complicated and building a system that can take that information and make use it in a very simplistic manner is non-trivial. Read some of scientific paperspublished by the authors of Acquine, and you'll see that their methodology (image processing, regression, Bayes' classification, decision trees, support vector machines, classification and regression trees, to name but a few) is anything but trivial.
Not only did they build something novel, but they built a system that does a good job of approximating human response to good/bad photography.
If you want to contest the true novelty of their work, through an academically-inspired claim that they combined existing technologies in a way that isn't terribly novel, rather than creating their own technology, then that's fine. However, the blanket statement that some researchers are trying to do "real work" and that Acquine isn't real work, is a giant red-flag indicating that you likely haven't got the slightest clue what actually goes on in the field of AI. Typically researchers like to tackle problems where the utility of their solutions isn't immediately obvious, the previous link to the RoboCup competition is a perfect example; who cares if you can build a robot that can play soccer? By your reasoning, that would be an incredible waste of time. Except, it's becoming the standard problem for multi-robotic systems research, and a large number of AI researchers are devoting significant time towards building RoboCup teams.
Why?
Simple, pick a real world task for a group of robots that "matters". Now decompose that task into all the subproblems that you would need to solve in order to have a robot complete the main task. Chances are, you're going to run into problems involving self-localization, team-work/cooperation, vision, data fusion, etc... All of those subproblems are being worked on and solved in different ways by researchers in the RoboCup challenge. And chances are, if you choose the methodologies used by the teams that win games you're likely to have chosen the most effective methodologies available in the field.
The true value of research isn't the end-product of each individual research-project. It's the end-product of many "useless" research-projects combined.
Sorry, GP... I just realized that posting the wiki link like that was basically akin to saying "L2wikipedia, noob", but it wasn't intended that way: The article doesn't actually say that the "L2" where the spacecraft are "staying" is actually the L2 Lagrange Point. Basically, as the wiki mentions and as others have stated, it's one of the 5 well known points where gravitational forces between the sun, moon and earth all cancel each other out. So the satellites can basically "hover" in the exact same position (relative to the earth and the sun) without having to move. For these particular satellites, that allows them to always stay in the earth's shadow, and, when their positioning (relative to the sun) allows for them to study a particular area in space, they won't have the earth periodically passing between them and whatever they're studying.
True, but it's a fairly good indicator. C'mon though, it's Chrono Trigger ffs... who doesn't have memories of playing that game for hours and hours on end?
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It's sleek, informative and minimalist. 2-thumbs up, would buy again!
The two people mentioned in the article as being behind the policy are:
MK Rudolph - mrudolph@santarosa.edu and
K Fiori - kfiori@santarosa.edu
The latter created the policy (director of computing services) and the former has her weight behind it (VP Academic Affairs). Just figured it'd be useful information to have. I'm in no way suggesting that all of slashdot go out and register variants of hotGritzIn_SJRC@gmail.com and youSuck_SJRC@yahoo.com or anything like that. And using hundreds of those emails to spam the everliving bejeezus out of their mailboxes would be nearly as morally questionable as suing your own students for making similar addresses. So I'd never suggest that either.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish we could get it back, but I don't even know why it left to begin with...
I like achievements that reward for completing aspects of the game that would stand on their own. Such as defeating boss X, clearing instance Y or achieving Z kills in a deathmatch.
However, I intensely dislike achievements which are the extra content - such as exploration, collection and some hard-modes.
The overwhelming majority of the WoW achievements are, in my opinion, achievements done wrong. The ones that reward your average raider or pvper for accomplishing the goals that they were shooting for before the achievement system even came out, are my idea of achievements done right.
Awesome, thanks =)
It's a story that is still (at least 5 years ago when I went through) recounted in infantry officer training for the Canadian military.
Your current soldiers are solid. Your previous soldiers were solid. This isn't a pissing contest, but when it comes to having historically solid troops I think we, at least, have earned the right to reflect on the sacrifices of our respective troops on different days *. Yours on your day, and mine on my day. Which is to say, we know it's memorial day. Your soldiers are and have been heroes, but keep your holiday to yourselves. Just as the rest of us keep ours to ourselves.
* - it's worth noting (though I can't find the citation) that the method by which the cdns held kapyong against the 3-5:1 odds was by calling down artillery on their own position
It Makes sense, there just defending their spices! So Barking is just Alien language, they're communicating their plans for world Domination with each other!
The spice must flow?
FTFA: Amazingly, right now Chihuahuas are still considered C. lupus familiaris, a subspecies of wolf. And calling a Chihuahua a wolf is like calling someone at the Discovery Institute a scientist.
Dogs aren't even a separate species from wolves. Further subdividing them is just silly.
Yup, completely silly. When I think of a yappy little chihuahua, I think "Osht son, that wolf wants to eet meh!! RUNS!!!!!1111eleven" and definitely don't think about how much I'd like to kick the yappy fucking football >.<"
That was sarcasm btw; just throwing that out there in case someone misses it.
Well you have to grow the crops to create the biomass, no? That requires things like herbicides (potentially not required if the weeds are just as useful as the crop) and pesticides. It also requires harvesting in some fashion. All that is currently accomplished (except on not-so-useful small scales) via tractors. Tractors use gasoline or diesel. Currently (citation likely needed, but I can't remember where I read it) biofuels are being slammed because of the fact that it takes more fuel to grow and process the biomass than is actually recovered from the biomass as biofuel to begin with.
I would put forth that the absolute dollar cost is not really the issue, it's the ratio of energy in vs. energy out that is.
Of course, that's also ignoring the amount of arable land required to grow that biomass - use too much land and suddenly the cost of crops that could otherwise be grown there increases.
There's a good part of me that agrees wholeheartedly with what you just wrote. There's another part that finds the idea of gassing my kid mildly horrific. I think I'd still side with you on this one though. If you can trick your kid into becoming mildly sedated, so that they don't freak right the hell out as soon as they hear the high-pitched whine of a dentist's pneumatic tool, then it's probably worth considering.... as long as it doesn't knock them completely unconscious.
But that nagging feeling of it being wrong likely wouldn't go away. =S
The kid died from respiratory obstruction due to a malformed lower jaw and pneumonia. The article you're linking to mentions that the NO2 did aggravate those factors, but it was hardly the cause. Also, the article is from 1926 and the death occurred in 1923... pneumonia was the 2nd leading cause of death in 1923 as well.
I have this... Increadible feeling of... Deja vu...
Apparently so did the mods who modded you redundant... twice...
i c wut u did thar
While those statements of yours seem logically constructed at face value. It should be noted that CO2 isn't considered life-enhancing. That's like saying that logging companies should have never started replanting programs b/c cutting down trees is life-enhancing. Sure, cutting down trees is life-enhancing, but replanting programs make sure there's no shortage of supply. Your argument is akin to saying "cars are life-enhancing, so I should be able to drive mine through crowds at high speed."; The premise has absolutely nothing to do with the conclusion, other than the fact that they both involve cars.
So to with your argument, your premise and conclusion have no relation, unless your sole objection to "going green" is that decreasing CO2 emissions may affect your quality of life by lowering availability of creature comforts or significantly raising costs on them.
I share that concern. However, building/refitting skyscrapers to use solar panels, heat pumps, and self-contained greenhouses to deal with most of their heat/electricity generation and deal with most of their waste production would serve to enhance life: less pollution and less strain on the power grid (ie. less brownouts/rolling blackouts during heat-waves for places like california).
Given the cost of gas, if I could present you with two vehicles to choose from. The vehicles are identical in every way, except that one costs $1000 more, but gets twice the gas mileage. Which would you choose? $1000 more on a vehicle, over 5 years would cost an extra $16 a month on your car payments. But would cut your gas spending in half. Would that extra cash be life-enhancing? I pay $150-200 a month in gas, so it'd be pretty damned life-enhancing for me.
Basically, when people hear "this move will cause costs to go up. This is a trillion dollar program" it sounds like something we should immediately be against. But there are tangible benefits to many green technologies. In the case of hybrid vehicles, those costs are outweighed by the benefits. How many other changes would follow similar trends?
Basically, it's JUST A MODEL.
I challenge you to name a set of "natural laws" or really any aspect of current scientific research or long established dogma that isn't just a model at heart.
I'll grant you that it may not be fine-grained enough to allow for testable predictions within natural cycles, but it does show that there's a correlation between CO2 and temperature. Whether that means that CO2 changes cause temperature changes, or that temperature changes cause CO2 changes, or that some other process causes them isn't really all that relevant. The model is sufficiently robust as to state, quite clearly, that increasing CO2 emissions is potentially a bad idea, and that reducing them is potentially a good idea.
The question isn't "is the model fine grained enough that we can make large predictions based on it?".
The questions are "what are the risks associated with the possible courses of action/inaction provided it's right/wrong?
It's a factor in a risk assessment, plain and simple. Not to mention the fact that there are likely hundreds of thousands of business opportunities involved in becoming more green. It's all a matter of how it's done.
Disclaimer - I'm a meat-eating, V6-driving, ex-military hunter who is completely addicted to technology. ie. A far cry from a tree-hugger. That being said, if you can present me with green alternatives to the energy-hungry devices I RELY on, that aren't 150% the cost of the non-green versions, I will happily take them.
The field of AI is not comprised of a majority of researchers frantically trying to build an expert system that can pass a Turing Test. Visual data is complicated and building a system that can take that information and make use it in a very simplistic manner is non-trivial. Read some of scientific papers published by the authors of Acquine, and you'll see that their methodology (image processing, regression, Bayes' classification, decision trees, support vector machines, classification and regression trees, to name but a few) is anything but trivial.
Not only did they build something novel, but they built a system that does a good job of approximating human response to good/bad photography.
If you want to contest the true novelty of their work, through an academically-inspired claim that they combined existing technologies in a way that isn't terribly novel, rather than creating their own technology, then that's fine. However, the blanket statement that some researchers are trying to do "real work" and that Acquine isn't real work, is a giant red-flag indicating that you likely haven't got the slightest clue what actually goes on in the field of AI. Typically researchers like to tackle problems where the utility of their solutions isn't immediately obvious, the previous link to the RoboCup competition is a perfect example; who cares if you can build a robot that can play soccer? By your reasoning, that would be an incredible waste of time. Except, it's becoming the standard problem for multi-robotic systems research, and a large number of AI researchers are devoting significant time towards building RoboCup teams.
Why?
Simple, pick a real world task for a group of robots that "matters". Now decompose that task into all the subproblems that you would need to solve in order to have a robot complete the main task. Chances are, you're going to run into problems involving self-localization, team-work/cooperation, vision, data fusion, etc... All of those subproblems are being worked on and solved in different ways by researchers in the RoboCup challenge. And chances are, if you choose the methodologies used by the teams that win games you're likely to have chosen the most effective methodologies available in the field.
The true value of research isn't the end-product of each individual research-project. It's the end-product of many "useless" research-projects combined.
Sorry, GP ... I just realized that posting the wiki link like that was basically akin to saying "L2wikipedia, noob", but it wasn't intended that way: The article doesn't actually say that the "L2" where the spacecraft are "staying" is actually the L2 Lagrange Point. Basically, as the wiki mentions and as others have stated, it's one of the 5 well known points where gravitational forces between the sun, moon and earth all cancel each other out. So the satellites can basically "hover" in the exact same position (relative to the earth and the sun) without having to move. For these particular satellites, that allows them to always stay in the earth's shadow, and, when their positioning (relative to the sun) allows for them to study a particular area in space, they won't have the earth periodically passing between them and whatever they're studying.
Wiki Entry for Lagrange Point
True, but it's a fairly good indicator. C'mon though, it's Chrono Trigger ffs ... who doesn't have memories of playing that game for hours and hours on end?
OpenOffice.org Wiki has a problem Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties. Try waiting a few minutes and reloading. (Can't contact the database server: Too many connections (localhost))
It's sleek, informative and minimalist. 2-thumbs up, would buy again!
Two words: Coeds. Tutoring.
mods: +50billionty, insightful as hell
do it up...
The two people mentioned in the article as being behind the policy are:
MK Rudolph - mrudolph@santarosa.edu and
K Fiori - kfiori@santarosa.edu
The latter created the policy (director of computing services) and the former has her weight behind it (VP Academic Affairs). Just figured it'd be useful information to have. I'm in no way suggesting that all of slashdot go out and register variants of hotGritzIn_SJRC@gmail.com and youSuck_SJRC@yahoo.com or anything like that. And using hundreds of those emails to spam the everliving bejeezus out of their mailboxes would be nearly as morally questionable as suing your own students for making similar addresses. So I'd never suggest that either.
Guess the Aussies overpaid, since their $560k "unbreakable" cryptosystem relies on SHA-1. Shock of shocks, I know...
we try to stomp em with The Boot.
It was super effective!
... they tell you that they can retrieve the files that you had on the hard-drive that was just stolen from your office.
/facepalm
You can die of old age if you like. Personally, I'd like to live for a very long time... even if that means slowly turning my body into a synthetic.
it has come to pass!